The central message from Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, was a simple one on Friday, as he spoke out on the Newtown, Conn. school shootings for the first time: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Neither he nor the other NRA officials who spoke at the highly-anticipated news conference in Washington, D.C. took any questions from the media. But LaPierre did offer the journalists assembled plenty of advice. Stop attacking guns, he said, because guns are all we’ve got to protect us.

“The media call semi-automatic firearms ‘machine guns’ — they claim these civilian semi-automatic firearms are used by the military, and they tell us that the .223 round is one of the most powerful rifle calibers … when all of these claims are factually untrue. They don’t know what they’re talking about!” LaPierre said in a prepared version of his remarks, which he stuck to closely during the proceedings. “Worse, they perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban — or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people — will protect us where 20,000 others have failed!”

What LaPierre didn't mention was that Alexis shot and killed that guard, and, realizing he was out of shells for his Remingon 870 Express, absconded off with the guard's 9mm semi-automatic Beretta handgun and proceed to continue shooting. So to summarize in LaPierre's simplistic language, when the "bad guy with a gun" was confronted by a "good guy with a gun," the "good guy's" gun simply became the "bad guy's" gun.